rimu

"It's hard to be poor, it's expensive to be poor, and moreover, public discourse is making it socially unacceptable to be poor. Whether it's bashing on beneficiaries, dragging our feet towards a living wage, throwing shade on school breakfast programmes, or restricting people's ability to collectively bargain for fairer working conditions, we must do better to lift aspirations and the lived realities of all our people. To that end, | want to say to this House with complete surety that the neoliberal experiment of the 1980s has failed. The economics of creating unemployment to manage inflation is farcical when domestic inflation in New Zealand has been driven by big corporates making excessive profits. It's time to draw a line in the sand, and alongside my colleagues here in Te Pati Kakariki, we've come as the pallbearers of neoliberalism, to bury these shallow, insufferable ideas once and for all. And this, sir, is our act of love."

Swim between the flags, people!

here is the body

This is the body of the post.

here we go again

The National Party is promising to axe swathes of jobs and “clean out” Kāinga Ora, the Government’s social housing landlord and developer.

When asked if there will be job losses at the agency, he said: “Hope so”.

Kāinga Ora was set up four years ago, and derailing it now would be “stupid”, Bill McKay, a senior lecturer in architecture and planning at the University of Auckland, explained.

Now the climate crisis is self-evident, a common argument by those who STILL defend polluters is that “NZ is too small to make a difference, and so shouldn’t have to stop intensive dairy farming or driving Ford rangers to school in Auckland”

Rod Carr destroys it in this mic-drop moment.

News stories don’t just pre-exist somewhere out there, walking around intact and whole, waiting for an equal chance to step through the door of a media outlet and into the public arena.

They exist in tiny bits and pieces, among heaps of junk and distortions and agendas — and the bits are selected, assessed, ranked, and assembled, according to the rigour and professionalism, or the whim and worldview, of the journalists and outlets involved.

Barry Soper chose to construct a pretty ugly beast out of their scraps. The Herald chose to parade it. Then they stepped back and let everyone else feed it, until the whole thing became something big and real-seeming enough to cause genuine uncertainty and fear, and to prompt genuine attempts to do the proper journalistic work of understanding what this new health initiative is all about.